Looking for a switch to do VLAN mirroring or port mirroring with several ports

Hello All,
We are looking at a product called LANGuardian. It's an agentless software that will allow us to track network traffic. The way it work is with port mirroring. My "gotcha" if you will, is that I have several physical servers that I would like to mirror as well, especially our shared storage. Currently we use Dell PowerConnect switches. They only allow for up to 4 source ports. I would probably need close to 30, maybe more. Someone mentioned to me Cisco Catalyst, HP or 3Com. I am not familiar with them so I am in the dark and was hoping someone else has done something similar and can recommend a switch that will do what I need. I've also been told that VLAN mirroring should work but I'm getting different explanations on what that really is.

Become the white hat who helps safeguard our interconnected world. Transform your career future by earning your MS in Cybersecurity. WGU’s MSCSIA degree program was designed in collaboration with national intelligence organizations and IT industry leaders.

Hi msidnam,
i monitor all the ports of the switch through the one that i choose to redirect the mirror, and i even span across multiple switches.
Basically you need to choose one port tht listens to all the others and send the results to the software that analyzes the traffic, in your case LANGuardian. Please note that when you do a mirror of the port, that port is really not accessible on the network, because it just listens to all the traffic: this means, in other words, that you can reach the LANGuardian machine only on its console, and not by any other means (rdp, remote access, and the like).

Port monitoring
back to top Most network core switches have the ability to copy network traffic from one port on the switch to another. This feature, which is called port monitoring or port mirroring, enables LANGuardian to capture traffic data for analysis.

Port monitoring is given different names by different switch vendors:

On a Cisco Systems switch, port monitoring is called Switched Port Analyzer (SPAN). You will often see references in the documentation to a SPAN port.
On 3Com switches, it is called a Roving Analysis Port (RAP).
The documentation for HP switches uses the term trunk monitoring.

Configuring a monitoring port on your switch involves the following steps:

Identify an unused switch port to designate as a monitoring port for LANGuardian.
Identify the switch ports you want to monitor (these are often called source ports).
Configure the switch to associate the source ports with the monitoring port.

The switch will send a copy to the monitoring port of all data flowing through the source ports. LANGuardian captures the data from the monitoring port for analysis. The actual data itself is not affected and there is no performance impact.

I guess my biggest question is will the cisco catalayst (or another switch) be able to monitor more than 20 ports at a time to one destination port?

I have the LANGuardian configured and working with no problem. However, my Dell 6248P can only monitor 4 ports and i have around 15 or more physical server that i want monitored including the router which will grab anything on the edge.

This article is in regards to the Cisco QSFP-4SFP10G-CU1M cables, which are designed to uplink/downlink 40GB ports to 10GB SFP ports. I recently experienced this and found very little configuration documentation on how these are supposed to be confi…

After creating this article (http://www.experts-exchange.com/articles/23699/Setup-Mikrotik-routers-with-OSPF.html), I decided to make a video (no audio) to show you how to configure the routers and run some trace routes and pings between the 7 sites…

Here's a very brief overview of the methods PRTG Network Monitor (https://www.paessler.com/prtg) offers for monitoring bandwidth, to help you decide which methods you´d like to investigate in more detail. The methods are covered in more detail in o…